The Bolting Horse
The Bolting Horse
Human beings are designed to feast in December and then lie around bloated till February. The Chinese Year kind of respects this. And here I am early Monday morning walking past the line of cars queuing to get into town. The newspapers judge success by “growth” alone; don’t they know that growth must be finite on a finite planet?
This is the noman’s time between the Solstice and the Spring Festival, astride between the new and old Chinese years. Anyone who wants a feng shui man, wants him now, so even I am walking relatively fast. A smart Volkswagen Beetle creeps by at three mph. The driver’s texting; a youngish guy in an inexpensive suit. I overtake again, he creeps past again, balancing his phone between his knees. He looks tired. Bless him.
As usual at this time of year, I’m re-visiting buildings that were fine-tuned for the Year of the Wood Horse, in order to set them up for 2015. Everything needs re-assessing; the West, for instance which has been the most helpful area for twelve months is becoming tricky. Nature doesn’t work in straight lines and this change of overall energy can creep up. Already I’ve had an s.o.s. from Heather whose pregnant daughter is in an otherwise perfectly serviceable West-facing house which has suddenly turned nasty. And another via my website from a lady I don’t know whose domestics are becoming physical. An ornery West can be like that.
Change is constant; how and when it’ll show up, on the other hand, can be very hard to predict. What I can tell you now without getting fiddly, is to stay out of the West and avoid facing South West for long. You can always hire me of course.
What I do feel confident to predict is that 2015, the Year of the Wood Sheep is likely to be very different from the brazen, publicity-seeking Wood Horse; unearthed scandals, misbehaviour, misappropriation wherever we focused, whether Rotherham, Westminster or Capitol Hill. It will however reflect previous Sheep years to some extent (2003 was the last) and to a much greater extent, previous Wood Sheep years in the 60 year cycle (1955, 1895, 1835, 1775 and so on). I’m talking about this the Year of Gathering, at Rachel Elnaugh’s Source tv event on February 3rd in London. You can also get the gist in this article for Take A Breath magazine. I’m also Tweeting,* FaceBooking and Linking-In what each of us can expect this year, Animal by Animal; forecasts for Rat and Ox are already up.
Brand New
And as it happens, on St Martins Lane I bump into Russell Brand; pretty much literally. He has a wild gleam in his eye but the sweet romantic 1975 Wood Rabbit that he is, is actually kind of blessed by the Sheep. We have a short argument.
“Revolution is all very well, I say, “but there’s a general election in a few months.”
“Revolution Now!” he says with that wild gleam.
“The important thing,” I tell him, “is that younger people vote.” Because otherwise the powers-that-be will simply continue to flatter and favour voters – mostly older, mostly settled, and mostly not likely to live to deal with the ecological, financial and military-industrial crunch that is coming.”
“Revolution Now!” he repeats.
Ram Dass once said words to the effect that some of us need to meditate while some of us need to learn our post codes and I’d like to say that I set Russell straight on the point that Revolution Now! is not just politically but also spiritually poor timing but the truth is that I don’t. Advanced thinkers like Andrew Harvey, Karen Armstrong, Caroline Myss and Marianne Williamson are becoming more engaged not less. Instead I apologise for forcing myself upon him, remind him what an admirer I am of his work, shake his hand and withdraw.
He makes good points of course. Just as he remarked on his Trews, on YouTube, David Cameron almost drools as each new threat offers him the chance to impersonate a statesman. Each of the leaders of the big parties subscribes to “austerity” and the fantasy of industrial nations driven by growth living within their means. The Earth is finite, for God’s sake. And they all chop the air meaninglessly with their hands as they talk, in exactly the same way.
And Brand is right as academics Jeffrey Sachs and Naomi Klein will endorse, that the mad “growth” motive of oil giants, banks, IT providers and others is suicidal. There are three Climate Change Summits this year. Some experts like Guy Mcpherson reckon that the stable door is locked and the horse long since bolted; the Sixth Great Extinction is under way. Some like Andrew Harvey , refuse to despair. These gatherings may be a late opportunity to charm the horse back into the stable.
Tuesday morning, the cars are in line once again. My friend Martha in Tennessee whom I teach ba zi and feng shui by Skype, is terrified she is losing her memory so I reassure her that we may lose faculties as we age, but we gain them too. And I talk Marilyn in Vancouver whose son is in rehab, through the process of seeing herself in him so as to pull them both back from the brink. Another day, another Tune-Up, another traffic build-up. Russell Brand says it’s time for Revolution Now! but I think most of these guys would settle for 20 minutes longer in bed.
Richard Ashworth © 2015
*as @FengShuiDiaries